A rough sleeper in Windsor, where the council leader has asked for beggars to cleared from the streets for the royal wedding.
Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

On Tuesday, a 66-year-old homeless man was found dead under a flyover in Bournemouth. The newspapers are calling him Kev, which was his name, but written down without a surname has that shabby tang of over-familiarity that papers use in a tragedy to show how much they care. Kev must have had a surname. It’s just that nobody knew it. The borough council is now accused of having taken Kev’s sleeping bag two weeks previously, an act it vigorously denies. But its previous policies on homelessness are so baroque they read like ideas dreamed up as part of a drinking game at the Bullingdon Club. In 2015, it played 24-hour bagpipe music at the bus depot to stop people sleeping there. Two years later, 144 rough sleepers were bought one-way tickets out of town. Destination: Someone Else’s Problem.

It is often in the bureaucratic detail that the cruelty of homelessness becomes vivid: the time Stoke-on-Trent council tried to impose a £1,000 fine on the people sleeping in tents in the city centre; the councils installing benches with spikes, shooing away their own citizens like pigeons; the council leader in Windsor who wrote to the police chief, asking him to clear out the beggars in time for the royal wedding.

Councils tend to defend their actions on the grounds that they have tried to intervene but been rebuffed, and thus the homelessness was a choice. The fact that official homelessness figures – thought by Shelter to be an underestimate – went up by 13,000 in 2017 suggests that housing scarcity must be a factor. It is improbable that 13,000 extra people would choose to be homeless spontaneously. But even if you took it at face value, there is something in the way homeless people are treated after their “choice” that is chilling. Beyond the callousness, there is the Kafka-esque absurdity in asking someone who can’t afford shelter to find a grand. Beneath the institutional cunning of those practical manoeuvres lies the grim question: “We can’t help it that they’re rough; how do we stop them being able to sleep?” Somewhere in some meeting room, between hitting a housing crisis, deciding the strategy was adequate, throwing up their hands in frustration at those who refuse to be “helped” and devising deterrents, these officials cease to see rough sleepers as people, framing them instead as a threat or a nuisance to all the proper, legitimate people. Rough sleepers don’t become real again – three-dimensional, deserving of empathy and sympathy – until they die, and even that does nothing for the living. At the end of last year, Lindy Louise Pring died in a park in Cardiff, at the age of 32. On Christmas Eve, Christopher, a man in his 60s, died on the floor of a shelter. The sorrow has no contagion: individual victims are brought back into the land of the dignified by their tragedy, but the homeless left alive are stuck in the dehumanised space of the public nuisance.

It is awful how easy it is to imagine that mental cascade. Local government officials are now in a situation so impossible – statutory duty on one side, insufficient resources to meet it on the other – that they have to conceive the homelessness problem as a set of practical tasks to execute, rather than a series of human interactions. It is easy to imagine, and probably the most dangerous slide imaginable.

We value Netflix more than banking – maybe more than our friends’ conversation

The value of Netflix has topped $100bn (£71.6bn), which was part of the plan all along, to change its name to Networthflix, and ultimately High Networthflix, once its turnover had outstripped that of Luxembourg and it had assembled its own standing army. It already has tax-raising powers, casually creaming 25 minutes of sleep off everyone in the US, Europe and Latin America, as they try to work out what the hell’s going on in House of Cards. Nothing’s going on, by the way. It’s just bad people being bad.

Netflix is now worth as much as Goldman Sachs, and if the global value system can be measured in hard cash, this is excellent news. We used to worship the purveyors of high-risk securitisation. Now we stand transfixed by a bunch of funny-looking kids who have psychic connections with a Shadow Monster. TV gets a bad rap as a passive pursuit, closely allied to the oxymoronic “activity” of chilling, but the difference between watching a series and not watching one is that the former requires concentration.

Once, we were content to watch life unfurl according to a set of incomprehensible formulae that we were sure someone understood. Now we will not rest until we know exactly what Princess Margaret might have thought the morning after her sixth hypothetical martini, and what effect it might have upon a zombie if eating brains imbued her with strangers’ memories. The real revelation of the box set is that we will happily drop 30 hours examining in the most granular detail the motivations of one character. I haven’t thought that hard, for that long, about any of my friends. That is not a rumination on the subjugation of reality to fantasy. It’s just an instruction to my friends to be more interesting.

Kids expose my personal statue of limitations

I was in the British Museum with a group of 10-year-olds, there to study Greek myth, but we’d done Medusa and gone down to the statues of the naked people. “This,” said one, “is inappropriate.” We had lunch, some Doritos next to the gift shop, and set off again. “Can we not,” said another, “see anything else inappropriate?” I was torn. Do I say: “There is nothing inappropriate about the human form, lovingly rendered in marble”? Or do I say: “Those penises are so tiny they do not really count”? In the end, I diverted them all to Mesopotamia, because there is nothing inappropriate about a Sahara-baked dead body and mummifying a cat.